This from the NY Times – excerpts from content sites are being challenged as copyright violations.
There are excerpts and then there are excerpts. You will see quoted material in many posts on this site. I tend to take quotes to capture a point made by someone else. Sometimes, I want to make it clear that someone else did say what I claim they said perhaps to make it clear I did not make up such a thing.
Other sites pretty much offer content originally presented by someone else. This practice, called scraping, is an easy way to generate a lot of content. Why create or even paraphrase when you can copy and paste?
The typical reaction by those who seek to change the interpretation of fair use is to bring up re-use, mashups, etc. – I disagree. There is little original contribution by those who pretty much repost. The fact that this has become a common practice does not, in my opinion, imply that fair use has not been adequately defined as has been claimed by some. Offer your comments and link. If you have no comments to offer, let the original post stand on its own.
I wonder just how far concern with this practice goes. Some aggregators basically scrape content – you can read the post from the aggregation site rather than use a summary to determine whether you might want to jump to the blogger’s site to read the post. This should be a factor a blogger considers when making the decision to register with an aggregator, but there should be a middle ground in which one can offer a RSS feed without granting another site the right to upload and present major segments of your content. I know that some blogging software allows the amount that can be automatically excerpted in an RSS feed to be limited (e.g., my WordPress blog, but not his Chyrp blog). Note that the NY Times article suggests even Google has come under scrutiny because the company adds ads to Google News feeds and is benefitting from content generated by others.